You Don’t Bury Survivors is a cautionary tale about cryonics, being lost and the quest for immortality.

Chris Bennett is only in his early twenties but old enough to have experienced heartbreak and loss. Looking to leave his bleak experience of England behind, Chris accepts a low-level role at the Fisher Foundation, a cutting edge Life Extension Facility located in the southern United States.

‘You Don’t Bury Survivors’ takes the form of his fictional diary as Chris embarks on this new life working for reclusive billionaire Sheldon Fisher. In it Chris describes his encounters with the facility’s cutting edge experimentation, from wonder drugs to anti-aging hormones to the body-freezing technology of cryonics.

As Chris develops friendships across the corporation’s cult-like atmosphere he is confronted by untrustworthy colleagues, professional jealousy and the potential for new romance. But has Chris travelled around the world only to discover his character inevitably shapes a terrible destiny?

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If you like Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror TV series, you'll love this. 'You Don't Bury Survivors' is a part techno-thriller which packs a real emotional punch. Written in epistolary form, the story takes us into the shadowy world of cryonics. All most people know about cryonics - not cryogenics - is the myth about Walt Disney being frozen (maybe the cryokinetic Elsa, a character from one of his own films, turned her powers on him?). But the author, Alan Devey has clearly done his research and it shows: the science bits never ring false. He also has a powerful imagination which comes out to play here in spades. The 'death is a disease to be cured' trope recalls Dean Koontz's 'Hideaway'.

The protagonist, Christopher Bennett, has moved to the US from England in order to pursue a new job opportunity (with the Fisher Foundation, who are involved at the bleeding edge of cryonic technology) and to start a new life. He gets a lot more than he bargained for. Over the course of his (frequently naive) narration of events, we discover more and more about the Fisher Foundation and slowly but surely we start to worry about what fate awaits Chris.

The world Chris inhabits is both familiar and different to us. His perspective is slightly warped/ off-kilter - though we are in the near future, he still writes by hand and he has closed down all his social media accounts... Indeed, he prefers to send postcards rather than tweets. Over the course of the story readers have cause to wish they weren't here as gradually, as he works his way down the levels of it (until eventually he reaches level minus twelve) the Fisher Foundation becomes more and more sinister.

Whilst at first his job is full of the usual "office nonsense" you'd find anywhere in the world, complaints about the mythical 'paperless office', bitching and moaning about your colleagues and competition, your bosses talking smarmily in corporate-speak, eventually we start to see the truth of the place. Without giving too much away, what goes on in the lower levels of the facility is scary... The labs recall those in the current HBO series 'Westworld', or perhaps, more aptly, some of the works of the British artist Damien Hirst, for whom death was a central theme.

The heart of the Fisher Foundation is Fisher himself, the old, rich patriarch. Fisher resembles, in some ways, Montgomery Burns, but he also subtly suggests Donald Trump, too. (And he quotes George W. Bush and boasts a motivational poster featuring a quote from Benjamin Franklin on the wall.) In the background there is quite a lot of political stuff going on here - Devey's fiction does not exist in a vacuum: there's a Republican uprising here too. The story anticipates government being overtaken by business corporate interests and aggressive individualism. Yet at its heart this is simply a great story.

In the end, like the work of Charlie Brooker, 'You Don't Bury Survivors' is in essence a morality play. It's a modern fable, and a great read. (And, personally, I love the title too.)

This is a wonderfully well written and researched story that's fluid in its composition. It resonates perfectly for me, in an era where the Elon Musk's and Digital mega beasts of Silicon Valley move to use their wealth to push the boundaries of human existence. At its heart, it's a straight forward tale of someone trying to turn his life onto a new path after a heart break and going somewhere new. Trying a new start, reluctantly dipping his toe into a new job and social scene and it all winding up going a bit weird. The hot and uncomfortable transition is extremely evocative and runs through every strand of the story. An excellent read.

I've had the pleasure of reading a few of Alan's full length novels (Wallfloweresque and The Spirit of Nagasaki to name a couple) and You Don't Bury Survivors (YDBS) is a novella very much in the same style as its older siblings: a gloriously understated and subtle depiction of regular, relatable characters thrust into unusual situations.

YDBS follows Chris Bennett as he arrives from the UK to the rural US to start a new job - and a new life - working for the enigmatic multi-zillionaire Sheldon Fisher's cryonics research foundation. The novella is epistolary in style, based on Chris's journal entries as he documents his interactions with colleagues and his new role in the Fisher Foundation. There is a dry and morose humour permeating most of Alan's work, and YDBS is no exception: the protagonist's drollness is tangible from his observations and explorations, and only his interactions with Sheldon himself leaven Chris's entrenched world-weariness. Sheldon's intentions and ambitions are subtly ambiguous throughout, as the sprightly nonagenarian takes Chris into his confidence and expounds on the nature of his quest for immortality. There is a beautiful contrast at the heart of the work: the passionate over-achieving persistence of Sheldon and his Promethean goal, set against the drab mundanity of Chris's existence as an under-achieving office drone. This dissonance creates a spark that fires the final quarter of the book and renders an otherwise improbable finale more believable.

The novella is thickly veined with a sense of despondency; promises of a dry and barren future mimicked by the landscape Chris traverses each day to get to and from work, and the dreary locale in which he finds himself, and his role as an eternal outsider, an alien. The spectre of US politics looms over the tale - prophetically, given recent events - which provides a sombre counterpoint to the lofty aspirations of Sheldon himself and his idealistic Fisher Foundation, or perhaps a fitting tribute to the mileage achievable by the cult of personality. Chris cultivates friendships, enmities and romantic liaisons, but still lives shrouded in a constipated state of frustration and malaise. Although he can run from his past, he cannot run from himself, and sees in Sheldon the glitter absent from his own life.

The writing throughout is subtle, the pace brisk. Alan's research has clearly been meticulous and is used judiciously: the details of cryonics are employed without detriment to the pace and with considerable benefit to the credibility of the story. The ending is plausibly ambiguous, and the author credits the reader with the intelligence to put together the strewn pieces of the puzzle and draw their own conclusions on the key themes.

In summation, You Don't Bury Survivors is an excellent, thoughtful work, eminently enjoyable to read and thought provoking to consider. It serves as an excellent introduction to Alan's style for those readers who might be interested in exploring some of the author's full length offerings.